Candyman (film)

Candyman is a 1992 horror film that’s done very poorly.

0 out of 10 stars.  I wish I could say this was watchable, but it’s really not.

This starts with two grad students (who look way too old to be grad students) collecting urban legends about evil creatures.  They come across a local legend (in Chicago) about the Candyman.  Legend has it that he was a man who murdered 21 women in the Cabrini Green Projects and that if you look in a mirror and say his name 5 times he will appear behind you.  Then she discovers the Cabrini Green Projects were built by the same construction company as her apartment building in Lincoln Village.  These apartments have passageways behind the medicine cabinets that connect them to other apartments.  Uber creepy.

So Helen and Bernadette, the grad students, go to the Cabrini Green Projects and interview the locals.  They tell a slightly different story.  Candyman was a black man who was in love with a white woman.  Her dad hired several men to saw off Candyman’s right hand, cover his body with honey, and wait for the bees to sting him to death.  Then they set him on fire.  Their list of victims includes a little boy who’s penis was cut off in an outdoor restroom.  Helen goes to investigate, alone, and gets beaten up by a local gang.  She identifies the leader and he is arrested.

Meanwhile, she jokingly says Candyman five times to her bathroom mirror.  Candyman appears, hypnotizes her, and then kills a dog with her body.  She goes home and Bernadette visits.  Candyman takes over her body a second time and completely eviscerates Bernadette.  Helen is taken to a psychiatric hospital where she eventually escapes with the help of Candyman.  She returns to the Cabrini Green Projects and saves a little baby, but is killed in the ensuing fire, becoming Candyman’s wife, the reincarnation of the white woman he loved named Caroline Sullivan.

0 out of 10 stars.  Really poorly plotted, poorly acted, and just plain dumb.  There’s a side story about her husband cheating on her, but I didn’t even care.  I was bored to tears.